Do YouTube With Drupal

I was asked by the organizers of the Do It With Drupal seminar if I would like the opportunity to create a YouTube clone in Drupal and talk about that process with the community. Of course!

Do It With Drupal will take place in New Orleans, from December 10-12, 2008. Besides my YouTube clone, other showcase fantasy sites will also be presented, including Flickr, Twitter, and FreshBooks.com clones. All built with Drupal! And that's just the first day. There are some really big name folks presenting at the seminar, like Earl Miles, Robert Douglass, Gábor Hojtsy, John Resig (who wrote jQuery), Matt Westgate, Moshe Weitzman, Angela Byron, James Walker, and more! Seriously, check out the speaker list if you haven't yet.

Now that I've agreed to that, it means up all this personal time I just freed up from finishing up Drupal Multimedia (which goes to the printers on Monday!) will now go to building this fun site...

How to Do YouTube With Drupal

First, it's got to be Drupal 6. "What?" some might ask. "Drupal 6 is not ready for production! Especially not for something as ambitious as a YouTube clone!"

But others nod their heads in agreement. The reality is that there are several production sites already using the release, especially with CCK and Views pretty much working properly now. Even Panels has an alpha, which I'm excited to get my hands on.

"How do you plan to display video?" others might ask. Of course, as most of us know by now, there are good solutions for video, even in Drupal 6. Obviously, I'll use FileField + jQuery Media for file management and display. For the player itself, I plan to showcase the Drupal Media Player for this site, especially with all the work that BrightLoudNoise has done on that module. Yes, it's not ready yet, but we've got a couple of months to get that going.

In what seems like a twisted self-referential parody, in addition to uploading videos for display, I also plan to allow users to upload YouTube videos to this YouTube clone, using Embedded Media Field. How cool is that?

Comments

I was only searching google today about how to make YouTube in Drupal, becuase I wanted to allow video uploads on a site I am developing, and the site is a closed community therefore cannot use anything like YouTube, Blip.tv etc.

The Hub is a participatory media site for human rights, an activist's YouTube if you will. And it is completely powered by Drupal and MediaMover. It's a complex module however, which is part of the reason why no version for Drupal 6 is already available. Since the video conversion runs on the ffmpeg software you can not expect to install the module and start converting mpg's and avi's to flv files, it does indeed require some configuration of both your server and the Drupal installation.

Aaron, is there a specific reason why you're not mentioning MediaMover in the presentation? Is the main reason that a version for Drupal 6 is not available yet?

Yes, I want to use MediaMover as well. Looks like there's been some considerable work towards porting it to 6, and I'll be able to jump into that queue over the next few weeks as I build this site as well.

I have a personal vested interest in this, since I spend half a chapter reviewing that module in Drupal Multimedia, and I'll look bad if it's not reasonably ready for Drupal 6 in the next few weeks... ;)

There are a lot of other modules I intend to use as well, such as Flag and some of the social networking modules (which have gotten a lot of *ahem* attention recently).

I'll blog about my experiences over the next few weeks in preparation for this event.

I'm working hard to push for D6 for Mover Mover- it already is a functional port, though it doubtless needs some help in doing some bug fixing as quite a few things needed to change for the D6 port. That being said, I posted status updates here and on the issue page